Show & Tell: Decentering Whiteness In Literature
By: Minseo Kim
하늘과 땅. Sky and land.
Bell chimes and fish gongs, swimming beneath bespeckled wood veins of the pagoda head, call out to the wind. Crinkled leaves, cicada wings, bow to the five bronze gongs of the newborn sun...
I read off of my paper, still tinged with its fresh-off-the-printer warmth. My friend nods every now and then as I read through my collection of poems and narratives. I had spent all of my previous night playing around with the words, phrases, and stories, and my mouth itched to spread into a grin when I reached my favorite passage. This time, I knew I struck gold. But then he raises his hand. I stop reading.
“It’s great, Minseo, really. But don’t you think it’s a bit too...Oriental?”
Show don’t tell. It’s one of the typical phrases every Exonian knows. The “Golden Rule” that English teachers spew tirelessly from their rulebooks to their students. But while it gets students to up their game in creative expression and make their writing more, well, ‘interesting’, there’s something that teachers don’t acknowledge: these lessons are gearing students to write exclusively for a white audience.
In her collection of essays Minor Feelings, Cathy Park Hong states “[The Asian American fiction and poetry I came across] seemed, for the lack of a better word, inauthentic, as if it were staged by white actors. I thought maybe English was the problem...English tuned an experience that should be in the minor key to a major key; there was an intimacy and melancholy in Korean that were lost when I wrote in English.”
White readers are expecting the “single story” from minority groups, groups they’ve cemented together with certain personalities, looks, economic background, and general stereotypes that they can't think of otherwise. The diverse plural becomes a series of singulars crammed into some wide-reaching term like “Asian.” And when they don’t get the story they expect, they leave unsatisfied. They place blame for their own discomfort on the writer for writing “out of character.”
After stories get filtered through white teachers, publishers and critics, what trickles out are the “white actors'' Hong mentioned. A white lens scrutinizes and fixes the character into the “quiet and studious Asian” mold.
In Hei Kyong Kim’s experience, publishers quickly shot down her novel drafts of an adopted Korean kid, a character translated directly from Kim’s own life as an adopted Korean American, by claiming that the character was “too angry, unsympathetic and unrealistic.” Writers can drop a trail of narration and symbolisms as hints leading to the message they want to convey. But many times, especially for the white audience reading a BIPOC narrative, unveiling hints doesn’t do the job. Showing isn’t enough.
The white-dominated publishing industry is unable to fathom the idea of diverse Asian voices. We sometimes need to tell, not show, our stories, in their most rough and explicit forms possible, for the audience to get the point. Implying ideas isn't enough. There’s only so far that readers can understand the subtle nuances—the passive-aggressive flame raging silently beneath printed words on the page—without knowing the non-stereotypical character. Feel free to “tell in order to show.”
I will not deny the proximity Asian privilege can have to White privilege, but “proximity” does not mean “the same.” The Asian diaspora cobwebs out to many ends of the socioeconomic spectrum. “Asian” is already an umbrella term for so many different cultures and peoples—the continent of Asia itself is the largest geographically at over 40 million square kilometers and also the most populated, at over 4.5 billion people. The big question remains: how do we go about reinventing the Western literary world to encompass the many BIPOC stories and remove the white filter?
The Academy must include many more books by BIPOC authors in their lists. They must acknowledge the diversity and not be blindsided by a single-story mindset. The English and history curriculum should be open to teach more diverse literature. When reading students’ writings, instructors should be conscious of the many running narratives which diverge from the eurocentric style and further support unique students’ writing voices. Only then will our literary space start to transform into a more welcoming space for non-white students.
In order to deconstruct and reinvent literature, I ask writers to write for themselves. If you aren’t using language as a means of communication but as a means of expression, string in your motherland’s language. Experiment. Combine narratives with tradition, poems with lyrics, spoken word with videography, predicates with predicates (the sacrilege!).
But now, I will turn to the other side of the picture (plot twist!), away from my takeaway of Hong’s lesson. Earlier, when I said “tell, don’t show,” I encouraged this as a mechanism to deliver messages meant to be delivered explicitly to, say, a white audience, when the writer intends to create a bridge connecting “them” to “us” and hold the reader’s hand to walk them over to the bigger picture. But the truth is, it’s tiring for the writer to explain every minute detail and mannerism. It’s not the writer’s job to hold the reader’s hand and educate them. It becomes a game of elementary show-and-tell where the exhibition is a story and the presenter the writer, and the only way to get full marks is to unravel the meanings behind every gesture and historic reference made in the story.
Furthermore, it would mean that readers do not place their own efforts into unravelling those meanings themselves, and thus do not work to research and learn but instead place that burden on the minority. Ultimately, it’s still centering the white opinion and white fragility.
In the end, it’s the reader’s obligation to be active and look up words from different languages and cultures in the writing they don’t recognize. If it feels unfamiliar, that’s not on the writer. It’s a friendly reminder to the reader that their life isn’t the base format for everyone else. And they shouldn’t always wait for a definition to magically pop up in the next sentence either. Again, the writer isn’t required to add one in, and from the pure perspective of craft, following every word with a definition can break the piece’s flow. You do not write for the reader but for yourself. You do not cater your writing to a white audience.
Sometimes, even when a Korean author writes out the pronunciation for a Korean word in English, it looks foriegn to me until I say it out loud in the soothing Korean voice I’m used to. The word feels so welcoming, like a surprise gift hidden into the folds of the story. I am grateful the writer includes them. Sometimes, American publications are only able to print in the English alphabet. It’s a compromise between English and Korean–a dip in both worlds–and the same goes for all other languages. Language carries sound. It has such close ties to our memories, emotions, humor, expression, daily lives and “inside culture” that words like “jeong” or “dab-dab-hae” or “jik-meok” transcend any combination of the tens of thousands of words in the English arsenal you try to make as replacement.
We’re looking at two sides of the same coin. On one hand, we tell by explaining many aspects of the minority experience. On the other hand, we should not feel obliged to always tell, but express ourselves in creative forms of literary art and in languages and words that mean so much to us, meanings that become lost in translation.The Academy’s English department must come to a compromise between showing and telling, strides which to my delight I’ve already been hearing from my friends and teachers. Once it does so, we’ll make progress in decentering Whiteness and Eurocentrism from literature and successfully transforming it into a space where people of color can reflect, self-express, and feel free.
